George Washington

In December 1783, Charles Willson Peale wrote to fellow artist Benjamin West in London, asking advice for getting two full-length oil portraits—including one of George Washington—made into prints. Frustrated by the lack of skilled craftsmen and printers in the American colonies as well as proper supplies, he turned to England’s thriving printmaking industry to reproduce his portrait of the first president for wider audiences. A friend transported Peale’s work to London, where publisher John Brown commissioned English painter and illustrator Thomas Stothard to make drawings after the portraits. The prominent engraver Valentine Green then made mezzotints from Stothard’s drawings.
When Peale received Green’s mezzotints of Washington, he discovered that his original composition had been altered and his name misspelled
in the caption. The technical sophistication of the mezzotint, however, far surpassed anything that was being produced in the United States at that time.